It’s Friday afternoon and I’m about to lose the internet for the weekend again, since work is still my only regular source.
So what happened this week?
Classes started of course, Junior High School anyway, Elementary on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon starts next week. Although in September I will miss half the classes, 4 of the 8 days are cancelled for various reasons. One of which is the Junior High School speech contest on Thursday September 4, all of the JET participants are judges.
We are also supposed to be tutoring a student from our schools in preparation for the event. I know that the others have been working with their kids for weeks, I saw mine for the first time this week. We’ve had 2 sessions of an hour each. I’ll see her again this afternoon but I’m afraid she’s horribly behind. Andrew has been working with his student for several hours a day for weeks now, I don’t have great hopes for the event, I just hope I can help my student make a decent show and not embarrass herself.
This morning the three classes had English back to back, it was a bit tiring. Not that I do much, just stand around and occasionally read out some words or sentences, if I’m lucky I get to take part in a game with the students. They all know the rules and I tend to mess up though.
This afternoon I sat in on a couple of art classes, I just did what the students were doing, the first group were modeling a hand around a wire frame. They were using a really lightweight modeling clay, it was nice to have a break from reading out sentences in English. The second group are carving seals (name stamps not the furry swimming kind) from stone, so I started on that, it’ll take ages to get anywhere though.
Earlier in the week I went out for okonomiyake with some friends (see the photo). Okonomiyake, that's where you go out to dinner, they give you bowls of ingredients and you have to cook it yourself on a hot plate that takes up most of the table. All while sitting on the floor in a space designed for someone considerably shorter than 6ft.
It was a lot of fun, Galen (USA) and Andrew (Aus) are fellow JETs but the girls were all local. Mayumi lived in Brisbane for a while and speaks very good English, she leaves for a one month holiday in Brisbane today actually. Nami is speaks a little English but is studying private lessons. Selena (or Serina? Now that I think about it the accent makes it hard to tell) is blonde and European looking, she’s originally from Argentina but has lived in Japan for 11 years. Her Japanese is perfect, but she speaks practically no English at all. Naturally that made for hilarity all around.
It was good to get away from the English teaching crowd and hang out with some locals, I can see how easy it would be to develop a cocoon where you only really associate with the other foreigners, that would be pretty sad.
Ok, that’s me for the week.
See you later.
